WATCH: Russian 'Documentary' Claims Americans Love Showing Gay Porn to Kids
Russia's state-owned Rossiya 1 television last month aired a 90-minute "documentary" about what it calls American perversity, which either willfully or negligently portrayed an obviously farcical video, presenting it as news footage of a gay couple presenting to their 11-year-old son his bedroom freshly decorated with gay porn on the walls, Vox is reporting.
In actuality, the footage is a humor video created by users of 4Chan, a media-sharing online bulletin board, that went viral. An over-the-top re-edit of a Fathead sports graphic commercial that Vox says has spawned many a spoof, the video replaces a two-second frame that originally showed a massive monster truck graphic on the child's wall with a shot of a wall collaged with naked men.
A dramatic soundtrack drives home the "documentary" narrator's weighty question: "Is it appropriate for a child's bedroom to look this way?"
Russian critics of Western culture and state-run media wonks frequently refer to something they call "gender fascism" as a tool in the supposed American and European war against traditional family values, doing so again in the poorly vetted Rossiya 1 documentary.
http://www.advocate.com/world/2014/12/06/watch-russian-documentary-claims-americans-love-showing-gay-porn-kids
= new reply since forum marked as read
It's somehow too strong and too weak all at the same time.
Putin doesn't dictate a lot of things. There are large areas that traditional dictatorships regulate and rule in that Russia doesn't seem much to care about. At the same time, there are things that Putin seems to care about that dictatorships have typically ignored.
Dictatorships are very often at odds with a majority of the population, or at least a large minority that needs to be oppressed. In Russia, the majority of the population is not only in sync with Putin, but in many cases has actually been more into command and control.
I think of Russia as parroting China. The Chinese dictatorship has led to an era of increased openness and Putin is doing the same. The economy may be largely under state control so that the state can continue to push its development and enrich cronies in blood and in the faith, but the state is mostly interested in the conjoined twins of culture and politics. It plays to a conservative kind of traditional culture ("nationalism"
in which there are outside foes (xenophobia) while linking the outside foes and internal cultural innovators with disorder and chaos (pro-order). Nobody likes crimes, corruption, and chaos, and Russian polls have returned the results that a broad spectrum of Russian society prefers social order to democracy.
Putin has actually said that people can economically do what they want, he just wants them to stay out of politics. Only in the last 6-7 years have culture laws been promulgated and history been un-re-revised. The separation of culture and politics that happened in late Soviet times is being undone. That is one thing that people in the West and even in Russia have noticed.
Some of this is because of media manipulation. But a reasonable amount of it isn't from manipulation: The manipulation is sincerely desired, the people want to be deceived and run after their delusions out of some sort of psychological need. The social and economic chaos of the 1990s led to a Sartrian kind of existential nausea among fearful, traditional, closed-in Russians. Authors like Sorokin have really upset some people--and when they start making political pronouncements, well ... The culture workers were noticed "engineering human souls" and have to be stopped. I'm not even sure where writers like Ulitskaya stand these days--was the European prize awarded to her earlier this year an attempt at a defense or "re-engagement"?
Russia has, unlike China, had a convenient vent to the kind of pressure cooker this kind of society produces. The '20s, like the '70s, '90s, and '10s (and even periods in the 1800s) have seen waves of emigration from Russia, dissidents and those who chafed under societal edicts who instead of changing those around themselves and trying to fight to change society prefer to leave (the '30s and '40s had a similar kind of emigration, but it was "emigration" to the GULags--like most other things, preference didn't matter, what wasn't prohibited was required). We act like Putin should be ashamed of this. However, he's got to know that it exists and the function it served and serves.
That pretty much says it all.
